All About Trans: Avoiding Responsibility

The All About Trans project looks at creative ways to encourage greater understanding between trans* people and media professionals to support better, more sensitive representation in the UK media.

The project offers the trans* community a platform to speak out against the prejudice they may experience and promotes engagement between the wide diversity of trans* voices and the media.” – http://www.allabouttrans.org.uk/about/

Over the last two months one of the people who works with All About Trans and has a reasonable media profile has been making comedy videos where he plays a woman in an ill-fitting wig with facial hair. He has ignored criticism that it mocks trans women regardless of his intentions. When it was pointed out to All About Trans that this made him unsuitable to represent trans people they said:

We do not and have never claimed to represent the trans community – that’s not our remit.

I understand that All About Trans sees itself as merely a link between transgender people and media. Leaving aside that this isn’t quite true – the project has been cited by name in various media outlets and in the quote above refers to offering a platform – making connections like this is not and cannot be neutral. There is discretion and choice involved.

It doesn’t matter if All About Trans want to represent trans people or not. It doesn’t matter if we want them to represent trans people or not. The fact is, to the writers and presenters, and to the general public that see what is written and broadcast, both All About Trans and the people that they select are there representing trans people.

All About Trans puts forward a certain set of people to comment in the media. That selection is a choice they have made. When one of the people they have put forward has repeatedly made comedy based on prejudice against trans women, All About Trans have promoted a transmisogynist as representing trans people. In failing to condemn the material that hurts trans women, All About Trans have tacitly condoned it.

All About Trans cannot abdicate responsibility here. They are in a position of representing trans people regardless of whether they intended to or not, and the choices they make about who to promote matter. The actions of those representatives matter. If a person’s actions work against the group they are representing, they are no longer suitable to represent that group, and continuing to put them forward is therefore a statement about their actions. All About Trans have done good work in the past but in their response to this situation they are letting us all down. If the people running All About Trans do not think that the comedy in question is a promoting misogyny and transmisogyny then they should say so, so that we at least know where we stand.